Will Boomers Lead The Next Startup Explosion?

Cecilia Sagüés, 61, spends much of her time zipping around Santiago, Chile, with cartons of retail products in her car. One recent morning, Sagüés filled her Renault Samsung SM5 with boxes of baby wipes and diapers, delivering them for an ecommerce store--work that suits her lifestyle well.

“It’s not difficult,” Sagüés told me from her mobile phone as she pulled over for a few minutes, in a conversation assisted by a translator. A widow who receives a pension from a previous career as a real estate broker, Sagüés left that career when her brother got sick.

After her brother passed away, Sagüés began driving for Uber to supplement her income. Eventually, she says, she began driving for Shippify, as well. The service—which has created work for 25,000 drivers from its headquarters in Brazil—helps ecommerce companies make deliveries in South America, where timely shipping can be challenging because of the infrastructure.

“They are microentrepreneurs,” says Shippify’s co-founder Miguel Torres, who, with co-founder Luis Loaiza, has raised $1 million in seed funding from investors such as the giant logistics provider Aramex. “They use cars, bikes, combis or buses. They are looking at Shippify as a source of revenue.”

Sagüés is part an intriguing trend toward self-employment and entrepreneurship among people who are 50 and over, documented in the just-released Senior Entrepreneurship Report, co-sponsored by Babson College, Universidad del Desarrollo, Universiti Tun Abdul Razak, and Korea Enterprise Foundation.

The report found that the percentage of people over 50 who are self-employed exceeds those who are under 30. Eighteen percent of adults around the world between the ages of 50 and 64 and 13% of those between the ages of 65 and 80 are self-employed versus 11% of adults between the ages of 18 and 29, according to the report. Eighteen percent of those ages 30 to 49 are self-employed, it found.

Golf legend Greg Norman, 62, has built on his success in the sport to create a multi-national business, The Greg Norman Company, which sells products and services ranging from wine to golf course design. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar, File)

The report draws on data collected between 2009 and 2016 in 104 countries from 1.5 million adults ages 18 to 80 years old. About 16% of the world’s population is 55 or older, according to the researchers.